Statement From the Artist:

My ANTHEM movie billboard illustration

After six years at the University of Texas, I left Austin in 1963 and moved to Manhattan, eager for the excitement of Broadway and big-city life. I thought my education was complete, but my friend David Houston (with whom I pioneered 8 mm film making in high school) had just discovered a lecture series on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and he twisted my arm into attending #4 in Basic Principles of Objectivism – “The Concept of God.”

I had been raised a good Methodist, so imagine my shock when Nathaniel Branden destroyed God before my horrified eyes — in an evening of infallible logical, with a twinkle in his eye. I couldn’t argue with what he said that night, so I bought a paperback of ATLAS SHRUGGED, and for the next three months, on the subway to and from work, I read the twelve-hundred-page novel while attending weekly gatherings at the Roosevelt Hotel, completing the 20-lecture series that had captured me.

From the moment I read Ayn Rand’s smallest book, ANTHEM, I saw it as a serious science-fiction movie. I was an artist, so I did several sketches of scenes I envisioned for ANTHEM, the movie – in Technicolor and CinemaScope, of course.

I met Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, Allan and Joan Blumenthal, Alan Greenspan and others in that amazing inner-circle, humorously called “The Collective.”

When I started producing TV and radio commercials for Grey Advertising, my promotional mind inspired me to paint a billboard illustration to promote ANTHEM, the movie – and that is the art you have just purchased.

In 2001 I moved to Hollywood and attended a Beverly Hills party where I met Jim Snider, another writer/producer who shared my passion for ANTHEM. We became friends and set about to devise a feature film that would dramatize this simple morality tale — “Romeo and Juliet, in a future society that prevents their love by practicing what we’ve ever preached – uncompromised altruism.”

While dramatizing all the memorable moments from ANTHEM, our screen treatment adds new characters and events that give the story a powerful plot, which Ayn Rand said the book did not have. We want to create a thrilling motion picture adventure for Rand fans worldwide, and for a new generation. Barbara Branden once told me, “You are the man born to make the movie of ANTHEM.”

Kerry O’Quinn Texas, New York, Hollywood, Earth